Category Archives: non-design

I’ve moved this blog back to Blogger. The new URL is http://filsalustri.blogspot.com/. The new blog blends together all the topics I’ve written about in the past. Generally, they fall under the following rubric: Design, Humanism, and Productivity. Each topic has its own section in the new blog. If you want to only follow one topic, you can look up the topic-specific RSS feed at http://filsalustri.blogspot.com/p/feeds.html.

This blog will remain as an archive for the foreseeable future, but don’t expect new posts here.

In 2012, Mike Moffatt, and economist at UWO, wrote a piece called “David Suzuki needs an economics refresher course.” Well, no, actually he doesn’t. Indeed, it’s Moffatt who needs a refresher course – in the ethics of economic decision-making and of public debate.

There are two components to the question of protection (and restriction) of free speech: the idea being communicated, and the way it the idea is communicated. Too often, I think, the two are conflated, much to the detriment of a society’s success.

Evidence-based policy-making is the best known way to make policy. But it’s not enough to depend on evidence, even if the evidence were fully recognized by all participants. The agents who develop evidence – discover, measure, and communicate it – are biased by their value system. Beyond that, policy-making itself has its own biases independent of the nature and quality of the evidence used.Continue reading →

This is NOT “scientific consensus.” (Click on image to enlarge and see original source.)

Scientific consensus isn’t the same as consensus in politics, in business, or in deciding where to go for dinner. The conflation of the scientific and lay senses of the term are, I think, a primary cause of much of the general public’s distrust of the conclusions that scientists draw from their work.

Industry-sponsored academic research often ends up in the hands of single corporations. I think this defeats the overall goal of academic research, which is to improve everyone’s lot in life.

There’s a growing trend, in many areas of academia (such as engineering), to expect industry to at least partially match government research funding. The advantages, they say, are that industry involvement creates greater opportunity for knowledge and technology transfer, and academia can identify industry-relevant problems faster and easier. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the financial burden of research is partly transferred away from government; in this way, governments can be seen as “saving money.”